[Matplotlib-users] Duplicate Ticks

[Peter W. <pw...@go...>]

Hello,

I'm searching for a way to extract all text elements from a matplotlib
figure including their positions, styles, alignments etc. I first
tried to write a custom backend and to fetch all the texts from the
"draw_text()" method of the renderer. In contrast to the documentation
"draw_text()" does not receive a matplotlib.text.Text instance with
all the necessary information but only a simple string and a
pre-layouted position.

So I found this "findobj" method to get all Text elements from a
figure in a list, which is exactly what I was looking for. However, I
get some weird duplicates for all the tick labels and I don't know how
to handle them.

This is a small example that uses findobj on the axis objects and
prints the texts.

import matplotlib
import pylab as p

p.plot([1,2,3])
p.xticks([1],["tick"])
ax = p.gca()
fig = p.gcf()

p.draw()
def print_texts(artist):
    for t in artist.findobj(matplotlib.text.Text):
        if t.get_visible() and t.get_text():
            print " %s @ %s" % (t.get_text(), t.get_position())

print "X-Axis"
print_texts(ax.xaxis)
print "Y-Axis"
print_texts(ax.yaxis)

On all my matplotlib installations, all tick labels have duplicates
positioned at the end of the axis. Why? How to filter them out from a
list of Text elements? Their get_visible() attribute is True.

Another thing is that I first had to do a "draw()" call in order to
have the ticks generated/updated at all. How do I force an update of
the tick labels. Colorbar seems to have a "update_ticks()" method, but
I can't find something similar for the axis ticks.